5 Characteristics of Equitable and Climate-Ready Housing

A great deal is known, and ignored, about optimal human societal organizational characteristics. Medium-density, walkable infrastructure with a mix of housing and commercial buildings, such as this street in Magome, Japan, exemplify a scale of architecture humans maintained for much of its history.

In 2017, I wrote an essay entitled “5 Types of Buildings You Can Build Instead of Another Luxury Condo/Rental Building.” The piece was a response to the proliferation of generic glass-and-steel residential towers that have come to dominate so many major cities’ skylines. These buildings are designed and developed to be unaffordable, unsustainable, and used primarily to enrich large, globalized developers and investors, not house a city’s diverse populations in an economical, sustainable, user-friendly fashion. Last year, I co-wrote a piece about the predictable fall-out of this proliferation in a Brooklyn Paper piece entitled, “The City No One Asked For.”

Today’s generic, oversized multifamily buildings lack character, affordable economics, and sustainable, human scales.

The 2017 piece got decent traffic perhaps because, unlike some of my other pieces, it outlined what to do, not simply what not to do. I wanted to revisit the list because my views on what to do have evolved. Housing-driven affordability and ecological crises have deepened, and it’s clear the real estate industry has little interest in doing much besides grabbing as much FED-issued loot before the whole system collapses. Single-family rental developments still go up in the blazing, parched Phoenix desert, $750M towers still go up on the sinking South Beach sands, and Adam Neumann is still talking about his latest multimillion dollar exit.

For most of the last 80 years, single-family housing has been the main form of American housing, often developed in areas reliant on imported water, food, and energy to sustain.

Nonindustrial societies like the Bedouin live within environmental constraints, keeping their populations small and nomadic in order to maintain resource consumption and production parity. They don’t build Las Vegas in the Sinai.

I’ve changed my sentiments about startups and so-called innovative housing projects I once lauded. I used to believe the press releases, but now see how many were conceived and reinforce socioeconomic dynamics that keep the rich, rich in one place, and the poor, poor in another. A cool building in the ghetto doesn’t necessarily address why ghettos exist. There’s an urgent need to invest, build, and run the right buildings the right way in the right places.

With its collective ownership model, medium scale, and social, sustainable design, the Baugruppen model points to successful alternatives to most status quo housing options.

To suggest housing be built the right way hazards the question, what is right? To answer that question, it’s instructive to look at basically every successful terrestrial species, who evolve, not by ignoring environmental and social conditions, but by adapting to them. When faced with local water or food scarcity, most species won’t (and can’t) solve that problem by shipping those things from hundreds of miles away. Nonhuman species adapt by shrinking, ceasing growth of, or moving its population. And with few exceptions, most species don’t reproduce and provide no home or role for their offsprings. I suspect homelessness and unemployment are practically nonexistent in ant populations. Using the evolutionary best-practices of every species but humans as a guide, I’ve come up with a list of housing characteristics that might lead to balanced, resilient societies and ecosystems. Here goes:

1. Housing with space for all members of society. Like all organizational formations, human formations thrive when there’s a diversity of systems working together, but today’s housing system promotes a lopsided ecosystem, disproportionately catering to the ostensible top of the food chain, i.e. rich people. Likewise, other species accommodate every life-stage. Elder pandas aren’t sent to 55+ communities in Boca. Equitable housing is economically diverse and multigenerational, containing a diversity of buildings, unit types, and spaces to cater to the diverse needs of each.
2. Housing that is responsive to environmental conditions and constraints. It’s unfortunate to have to explain this, but building in deserts with imported groundwater and building on receding coasts and floodplains and building for populations requiring massive amounts of natural and labor resources to sustain — all of this makes individuals and societies way more vulnerable to collapse. Countries, states, towns, etc. need to stop pretending that any environmental threat can be overcome with technical stop-gaps (colder AC, flood walls, etc.) and imported resources. Housing, like humans, must adapt. The housing of the future must be designed, built, and scaled in ways that work within the constraints new climate dynamics impose; this generally means housing that’s smaller, more efficient, and on higher ground.
3. Housing that’s more than housing. While homes have long existed, the single-use house or apartment is a new thing. Pre-automotive societies required citizens to work from (or certainly near) home. The recent promotion of single-use housing resulted in today’s sprawlscape, where centerless cities require driving to do anything. This single-serving real estate ecosystem maintains props up polluting gas and oil industries and, as droves of remote workers are learning, forces people to devote large portions of their income and waking hours going from one place to another. Consolidating living, work, eating, events, and things like multigenerational care into a home or building adds time to lives and develops productive, resilient, and sustainable systems.
4. Housing that’s aesthetic. Here’s another thing I wish didn’t need to be said, but does: aesthetic, appealing things are better than ugly, committee-designed ones — even though prevailing trends in single family and multifamily architecture suggest otherwise. There is no good reason cities and towns everywhere can’t strive to have the aesthetic appeal of Florence, Italy or Magome, Japan.
5. Housing that’s sustainable. If housing requires nonrenewable energy to power, if housing requires large injections of debt-and-tax originated subsidies to make economically feasible, if housing is built on land that experiences regular flooding or drought or heat vortexes, if regional housing options exclude affordable places to live for every member of a functioning economy, especially its laborers, children, elders, and needy — if housing is any of these things, it’s not sustainable and needs to be fixed.